Back in May, Colleen Mondor put out a modest proposal for bloggers to write about their favorite political books (fiction or non-) during the month of August. (I previously noted this here.) I will happily be bloviating about George Orwell's 1984, as it happens to be one of my all-time favorite books (and a huge influence on my own fiction, and very specifically on my n*vel-in-progress). In the run-up to that post, when I have time, I've been poking about teh internets for inspiration.

And quite by accident, the other day, I discovered the following front and back book covers for 1984 on Amazon, posted by David Rolfe of Pasadena, CA:

They are from the 1954 Signet (#S798) paperback edition, and are quite unlike the covers for any other editions that I've seen for Orwell's most well-known novel, which tend toward minimalism, with the numerical title almost always taking up the majority of the space. Part of me loves the lurid pulpish nature of these covers, and I'd love to see a modern revisioning of them, along the lines of what Night Shade and Jon Foster recently did for Jon Courtenay Grimwood's 9Tail Fox (although I still love the groovy new Penguin covers by Shepard Fairey). (Wow, I said "love," like, three times in the last sentence.)

(David Rolfe, who originally posted the covers (thanks, David!) writes: "Note the button on the girl's shirt: 'AntiSex League.' But does she practice what she preaches?" Indeed.)

In case you can't read the over-the-top text on the back cover (which manages to not mention Winston Smith, Julia, O'Brien, Room 101, Ingsoc, or Oceania), here's what it says:

Which One Will YOU Be In the Year 1984?

There won't be much choice, of course, if this book's predictions turn out to be true. But you'll probably become one of the following four types:

Proletarian--Considered inferior and kept in total ignorance, you'll be fed lies from the Ministry of Truth, eliminated upon signs of promse of ability!

Police Guard--Chosen for lack of intelligence but superior brawn, you'll be suspicious of everyone and be ready to give your life for Big Brother, the leader you've never even seen!

Party Member: Male--Face-less, mind-less, a flesh-and-blood robot with a push-button brain, you're denied love by law, taught hate by the flick of a switch!

Party Member: Female--A member of the Anti-Sex League from birth, your duty will be to smother all human emotion, and your children might not be your husband's!

Unbelievable? You'll feel differently after you've read this best-selling book of forbidden love and terror in a world many of us may live to see!

Update 4: Due to the massive attention this entry has received, I am turning off anonymous commenting. Too many people showing up without identifying themselves, and though it has for the most part been civil and on the topic, there have been a few trolls who have committed insults and ad-hominem attacks, for absolutely no reason; these comments were deleted and IP addresses logged.

So, if you would like to comment, you'll need a LJ account (they're free, after all), but those who continue to display acts of dickery will be banned. This is my house, and I don't take that kind of shit from anyone.

Can you point me toward research that backs this up? I haven't heard this assertion before, and it seems a bit hard to believe (based on Beckett's oeuvre, and that fact that he's frowning in almost every photo taken of him).

Ohh. Look at the pretty picture. I'll get in front of my teleprompter (television) and enjoy my 2 minutes of hate (fox news). The Ministry of Propaganda (CIA) doesn't control all the TV networks. We have always been at war with Iraq.

Re: Lesser Humans... completely ignore the Fact that you are living 1984

As Tom Wolfe wrote in 1976 in "The Intelligent Coed's Guide to America": "He sounded like Jean-François Revel, a French socialist writer who talks about one of the great unexplained phenomena of modern astronomy: namely, that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."

1st thing I noticed: Is it just me or does it look like the blonde in the background is nuzzling the other girls neck?

Second thing I noticed: As you've mentioned, BB looks a bit off. I always imagined him like Lord Kitchener from the British propaganda posters, which would probably make sense that he described BB like that as he worked in the BBC at the time and made it known he disliked all the propaganda it was spouting out. But yeah, Stalin's also a solid theory.

Congratulations, this entry is linked to from Nealz Nuse, Neal Boortz' daily radio show notes read by (allegedly) half a million readers (many of them other talkshow hosts):
http://boortz.com/nuze/index.html

(my livejournal blog is dead old and moldy. My current blog is http://ben-bradley.blogspot.com)

Yes, of course I have read the book. How could it be one of my all-time favorites if I haven't read it?

Indeed, Julia is in the book as you describe. However, the interpretation of her on the cover art here neglects the entire mission of the Junior Anti-Sex-League, which is sexual repression. The Party wants to stomp out sexual attraction or responses of any kind, even going so far as to try to extinguish the orgasm through neurological experimentation. Not by tarting up your female members.

In fact, that was the edition my Dad had on the shelf, and the lurid copy and sexxxy cover are exactly what convinced me to pick the book up! Well, that and I'd heard somewhere that a dude got his head stuck in a rat-cage, which I thought was totally rad (this was the '80s, that was how we talked). So---count that as one victory for plunging necklines in the service of literature!